Unhinged
by WRTRD
Summary: In the middle of 4x21, "Headhunters," an angry Beckett confronts Castle at home. First two chapters are rated Rated T, but the final one is M. Three-shot. Complete.
1. Chapter 1

Detective Kate Beckett tells the doorman not to announce her. She doesn't ring the bell; doesn't knock. She'd kick in the door, but the small corner of her brain that isn't operating on full-throttle rage signals her that she's wearing her favorite, most formidable boots, and door-kicking could cost her a heel. She still has a modicum of self-respect, so she uses her key, the key he had given her two years ago when she stayed here after her apartment blew up. He had refused to take it back. "Just in case, Beckett," he'd said. Yeah, well, just in case is here, buddy. Time's up.

She storms into his loft. She doesn't give a rat's ass if Jacinda is warming Castle's bed right now. If she is, Beckett will throw her out on her straight-from-a-bottle platinum-haired ass. Okay, she doesn't have platinum hair on her ass—or maybe she does, wouldn't that be an electrolysist's dream—but it's not the point. Beckett slams the door shut with such force that she might have damaged a hinge. Good. He probably paid five thousand dollars for each of those stupid hinges. They're probably titanium, ordinary stainless steel wouldn't do, oh no. Probably custom made by an artisanal hinge maker who worked on the Bilbao Guggenheim.

She'd have stopped herself if Martha or Alexis were there, but she knows they're not. Anyone else? She doesn't give a damn. Not one damn. Not a half, not a quarter, not a part of a damn so infinitesimal as to be undetectable under an electron microscope. Well, she's in here now and where the hell is he? Didn't he hear his precious door slam?

"Castle! Richard Castle! NYPD!" That should bring him running.

Not running, it turns out, but dripping and skidding. He'd been in the shower and he's wearing nothing but a towel when he slides into the room.

"Beckett?" He looks shocked.

She's not looking anywhere except his forehead and, peripherally, his eyes. Certainly not his mouth. Well, not farther south then his chin. His unshaved chin. Because furious as she is, she is as attracted to him as iron filings are to a magnet. The feeling is no longer mutual. He doesn't care. She can't save them, what she'd hoped was them, but maybe she can save him from the dangerous and self-destructive situation he's thrown himself into at the precinct. They need to talk, if only to make a clean break. "You still recognize me? I'm surprised. Thought you might have been blinded by the dazzling Detective Slaughter."

"What are you doing here, Beckett?" His face is red; ticked off has replaced shocked.

"What do you think I'm doing?" Good thing her mouth is dry or she might have spat on him. Spat, or worse, drooled.

"You just broke into my apartment, and from the looks of my front door, broke is the operative word. And I have no idea what you're doing."

"I didn't break in. You gave me a key. Hardly counts as forcible entry." She looks quickly around the open space. "Is anyone else here?"

"No." He shifts slightly. She's furious. Madder than he is, but there's something else, too. "What the hell are you doing here at, at—" he checks his wrist but his watch is, of course, not there.

"Two."

"Two?"

"Seventeen. Two seventeen a.m."

"What the hell are you doing here in the middle of the goddamn night?"

"What the hell I'm doing is what I should have done years ago. Arresting you."

It must be two-seventeen in some perverse dream world, because surely none of this is actually happening. Especially the part where he's in a soggy towel and she's fully dressed. "You did arrest me, years ago, on a bullshit charge in the New York City public library. And you're arresting me again now? For what?"

"For pissing me off in the first degree. Me, an officer of the law. What the fuck were you thinking, Castle? Riding in the suicide seat with that lunatic Slaughter at the wheel? The name alone didn't tip you off? Not to mention his nickname, The Widowmaker, because his last three partners were killed on the job? And that scum is still on it? Do you know how lucky you are that all you've gotten so far is a bloody nose? Slaughter slammed a suspect's head onto the table in our interrogation room, for God's sake."

He looks taken aback. "You saw that?"

"Of course I saw that. I was watching out for you. I'm your partner."

"Sure haven't been acting much like it lately."

"What? That's the problem, Castle, I wasn't enough of a partner for you?" She points towards the sofa. "Siddown."

"I thought you were arresting me."

"I am. This is house arrest. For the moment."

"Jesus, Beckett," he says, as he sits. "You're insane."

She's towering over him. "Insane?" She is tugging her hair with both hands. "This from the guy who literally gave the coat off his back—his prized leather coat, no less—to a certifiable madman from Gangs, two minutes after he met him? That sounds pretty insane to me. And if I'm insane, at least I'm in therapy for it."

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

The air has completely changed. He shakes his head. "What?"

"Nothing." She mutters, but he hears her.

"You're in therapy?"

"Yes, I'm in therapy. You think less of me for it? Think I'm a weakling? No balls?" She can't hold onto this anger any more. Not after what she has just admitted, though she had had no intention of doing it. She half collapses onto the sofa. He's silent, and she takes an enormous breath.

"I've been in therapy since I came back in the fall. I thought I was making real progress."

"Progress in what?"

"Never mind. It's not important. I should go. I'll just say goodbye. Goodbye, Castle." She stands up, but he grabs her by the wrist.

"Oh, no. No, no. You're not getting away with that, Beckett. You owe me."

"I'll pay for the door. Sorry." She tries to pull away, but he tightens his grip.

"You know that's not what I mean. An explanation. You owe me an explanation. Sit down, please."

She has already ceded control; now she just needs to keep from crying as she returns to her seat on the sofa. "You know, after work today—yesterday—I went to my shrink about this."

"About what?"

"About you. About me. That's what I've been going to him about for months. But this time is was about Jacinda and Slaughter and everything. You know what he asked me?"

Castle doesn't answer. He wants to wait her out.

"He asked me what I thought you were telling me with your behavior. I told him that I thought maybe you weren't there for me anymore, that I waited too long while I was—as he put it, healing—and you moved on."

Castle waits a minute before saying, "And what did your therapist say about that?"

"That you could be protecting yourself by not taking any more emotional risks. I asked him what I should do and he of course answered with a question, what did I want to do?"

He waits again before asking, "And what did you want to do?"

"To get it over with, because I can't stand it any more. Because just as I finally admitted to myself that I'd fallen in love with you, finally knew how to be in love, you fell out of love with me. Because I was almost ready to tell you, and it was too late. Because now you don't just not love me, you hate me." She shook her hand free, got up, and walked in defeat to the door.

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N** Oops, I miscalculated. This will be a three-shot, because I felt that they really needed to do some talking. Rating goes up in the next chapter.

Beckett can't see the door properly because her eyes are fogged with tears that she's struggling to contain. She reaches blindly for the handle, but the door won't give. She tries again: no luck. The only thing she wants now is to leave, but there's no escape. Is this going to be her own version of _No Exit_ , the Sartrean hell of being locked in a room for all eternity? She rattles the handle, futilely. If Castle weren't so angry right now, he'd relish the irony: the woman who always had a foot out the door can't get even one of them through it when it counts.

She senses rather than hears him approach. He hasn't touched her, but she feels the heat radiating from him against her deeply bowed back. Shit.

"Beckett."

There's no way she can turn around to look at him; she couldn't bear it. She beseeches him, and her voice cracks. "Castle, please. Please, is there another way out of this place? A service door, anything? A fire escape?"

He clears his throat, and his voice is heavy. "There's no fire."

What? "What?"

"There's no fire, Beckett, so you don't have to leave."

"I do. Please, just show me how to get out and I'll be gone forever."

"No." Her forehead, pressed against the door, seems to be all that's holding her up. Her body looks impossibly both rigid and soft, and so fragile. He thinks that if he puts his hand on her, no matter how gently, the odds are equal: either she'll shatter or she'll curl completely into herself. But he can't not do it. He'll risk it. He'll catch her. He'll cradle her. He raises his right hand and folds it firmly around her shoulder, and uses his left to take her hand. Stepping forward so that he's only an inch behind her, he pulls her against him, and she suddenly doubles over, so that her head almost reaches the floor. An unearthly sound comes from her as she sobs, a great, heaving sob that vibrates in every one of his two hundred and six bones.

Castle immediately flashes back to the night in the hangar a year ago, the night Roy Montgomery had died. The Captain had made his confession to Beckett about his part in the cover-up of her mother's murder, and she had forgiven him. She had forgiven him, but she had begged him to name Johanna's killer, and he had refused. To protect her, he wouldn't do it. She had sobbed then, too, as Castle carried her to safety.

So he's going to carry her to safety tonight. He lifts her up, and holding her tightly against him, goes carefully to the sofa. Rather than stretch her out there, he sits down and gathers her into his lap. He tucks her head under his chin and rocks her as he would a child, and every bit of the anger and resentment that he had been harboring against her floats away.

Eventually she stops crying and is still. He wonders if she's asleep, but when he runs his palm over her hair, she stirs. "Beckett? Kate?"

Her voice is so tiny that it could have come from somewhere and someone else entirely. "Yes?"

"Can you look at me?"

"No."

"May I look at you?"

She doesn't reply, but she turns her head so that her face is pressed into his chest. A minute or two later he feels it, the faintest breath against his skin, and then a kiss so light he's afraid that he imagined it.

Castle is rarely unsure of himself, usually so confident in the tack he takes, but this moment is a exception. He had wanted to scream at her when she had burst in earlier. He had wanted to obliterate her from his life, to throw in her face every slight and injury that she had inflicted on him, and send her off. Until the moment when she had confessed. No, not confessed, revealed. Revealed that she, the most closely guarded person he has ever known, was willing to reveal herself to a therapist so that eventually she could reveal herself to him. Because she loves him. She loves him. She is in love with him but believes that he no longer loves her. She doesn't know it, but at the instant of her revelation, he forgave her, just as he hopes that she will forgive him his behavior of the past few days. She had tried to save him from himself tonight, at great cost to her own self. How in hell had the two of them screwed this up so badly? And what can he do to reach her so that between them they can set it right? He doesn't want the flight-or-fight response from her. The fight is out of him. He wants her to stay. He needs her to stay.

He and Beckett had had a horrible argument the day before Montgomery had died. She had called him, not kindly, the funniest kid in school. He was. Is. He's the funniest kid, the clown you can punch in the nose and he'll bounce right back up. For whatever complicated reasons, Richard Castle remains an optimist. And so now he decides that he can do it; knows that they can do it. Fix this. A life without her is insupportable, so he draws himself up, physically and emotionally, and takes her head in both his hands. He pulls her face away from his chest, and tilts it up.

"Open your eyes. Please. I'm going to hold on like this until you do."

At last, she does. Her eyes are still red, and very puffy, but she smiles tentatively.

"Good. I have to ask you: did I dream it, or did you just kiss me?" He glances down. "Kiss me about half an inch above my left nipple?"

She laughs very softly. "Yeah, I did."

"Was that good aim or bad aim? I'm happy to have you kiss me anywhere, but I was just wondering."

"Neither. It was proximity. Proximity and opportunity. It's where my mouth was, and." She waits several beats before she can finish. "And I didn't want to wait any longer."

"God, Beckett, I am so in love with you."

Just like that, the air had gone out of his lungs, and the truth had slipped out. Just as her telling him about her therapist had slipped out, except he's glad that his truth had. He likes this truth, is already reveling in this truth, because no sooner has he said it than she responds, "Me, too. Me, too. God, Castle, I am so in love with you."

It occurs to both of them, though neither says so, that in ordinary circumstances declarations like this lead immediately to passion. But there's nothing ordinary about this circumstance. What their declarations result in instead is an extended period of silence in which they lock eyes and do not let go.

"Beckett?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you want to get off my lap?"

"Not really, but I think I should."

"I think you should, too. My body is telling me to carry you to bed this instant—"

"I noticed," she says, and wiggles ever so slightly. "What with my being on your lap."

"Beckett! I'm shocked. Believe it or not, I'm allowing my brain to overrule my body, for the moment."

"Same here. Because we need to talk about this."

Castle smiles. "First time I've ever heard that line without dreading the next one."

And they do talk, for an hour, sitting as close to each other as possible. They revisit every joyous and painful moment of the last couple of years, picking things apart, piecing them back together. It's a variation on their building theory in a homicide investigation, and it works—not without moments of recrimination and regret, but it works. At the end, they're exhausted, spent, but lighter in every way. Everything is light. Everything seems simple and inevitable and right.

"You know, Beckett, I'm glad we didn't, but we could have had incredibly hot sex during that fight tonight."

"No we couldn't."

"No? Are you kidding me?"

"No, because I don't want the first time we have sex to be angry sex, or even make-up sex, which we could have had just now. We have the rest of our lives for that."

Castle nudges her knee with his. "Because when I'm ninety I'll still be able to piss you off and then we can have angry sex. Arthritic, angry sex."

"True. But also, we couldn't have sex tonight because I never put out on a first date."

Castle guffaws. He laughs so hard that he falls over onto her thighs and stays there, looking up at her. "This isn't a first date Beckett. A, we've already been dating for years, just untraditionally, and B, this isn't a date."

She brushes the hair off his forehead while failing to stifle a yawn. "Castle?"

"Yeah?"

"I have never been this exhausted in my entire life. Ever. I have to go to sleep."

"That's exactly we're going to do."

"Sleep, Castle. I mean it."

"I agree, I totally agree. But can we at least sleep in the same bed? If I promise to stay on my side?"

She is suddenly bashful. "Um, what about the door? What about your mother and Alexis?"

"My mother and Alexis are away for another four days. And in the morning I'll call downstairs about the door and someone will come up and fix it. At least we know that no one can interrupt us."

"I thought we agreed that we're just sleeping."

"That's what I meant. No one will interrupt our sleep." He takes her by the hand, pulls both of them to their feet, and guides her to his room.

But standing in front of his bed, Beckett is overcome by shyness again. "May I borrow a T shirt?" she asks quietly. "To sleep in?"

He squeezes her hand. "Yes, but only if you take it off sometime in the future, in front of me."

She gives him a slightly wobbly smile, and follows it with a long, NC-17 kiss—quite possibly, no, certainly—the best of his life. "It's a deal."

 **A/N** I was stunned by the response to the first chapter of this story. To say thank you seems inadequate, but thank you! I hope that you enjoyed this chapter; one more to go.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N** Please note: the rating for this, the final chapter, is M.

Castle sleeps on his back; Beckett, on her side. She had spent the last two hours nestled against him, but now she's awake and watching him. She tracks the occasional and very slight movement behind his eyelids, and wonders. How is it that she feels so animated on so little sleep? So full of energy when she has eaten virtually nothing for two days because she was busy eating herself alive? And why isn't she terrified? She had actually said to him, "We have the rest of our lives for that." The rest of their lives? She hadn't leapt from the sofa and made another abortive attempt to flee after saying that? Why?

Because of him. Because of the man who's breathing hypnotically, right next to her. Right. Everything is right. It's spring, so even now, at six thirty, the sun is up. It seems right to be starting something, starting this, in spring. Five hours ago, it would have seemed impossible. Hell, four hours ago. It was barely four hours ago that she had been so enraged that she had broken his front door. She might, if put under oath, admit to having had thoughts about breaking that very door, but for an entirely different reason and in an entirely different way. One that involved the two of them.

Castle had fallen into bed in nothing but a pair of boxers, so his chest is bare. She skims one hand over it, still astonished by how soft the skin is. There is just a dusting of hair on his chest, and a great deal of muscle underneath. She's not waiting any longer. She wants to return to his left nipple, but she's on the wrong side of him for that, so she has to begin with the right. She plants a kiss just above it, and follows that with a sensual swirl of her tongue around and around it. He doesn't react, so she kisses and swirls again. And again. Why isn't he moving? She inches herself halfway across his chest so that her mouth is directly above his left nipple, and she tries again, this time adding a tweak to the mix: kiss, swirl, tweak, kiss, swirl, tweak. His nipples have hardened but he's not awake? She raises her head slightly to check on him and finds his eyes wide open.

"Morning," he says, dreamily.

"You big faker," she says. "I knew you weren't asleep."

"Yeah? What gave me away?"

"This fully aroused nipple." She kisses it again. "Thought I'd start where I started last night."

"But not where you left off," he says, pulling her up until they're virtually nose to nose.

It's her turn to sound dreamy. "Yeah? Where was that?"

"With your tongue halfway down my throat."

She deliberately slithers a little closer. "Is that a complaint?"

"No, definitely not a complaint." He chuckles, and then he stops. He looks into her eyes more intensely—trustingly, lovingly, longingly, hungrily, searchingly, incandescently—than anyone ever has. "That was a hell of a kiss," he says at last.

She blushes a little and whispers, "It was a hell of a night."

"Gonna be a hell of a morning," he whispers back. "A hell of a hell of a morning."

"I hope so. I think so."

"I know so." He runs his palms slowly across her face, stroking her cheekbones with his thumbs, before he moves his hands gently into her hair and draws her down. His lips brush against hers so lightly that it's almost a suggestion of a kiss rather than a kiss itself. He breathes against them, a half-dozen syllables, a sextet of words. "I. Want. You. I. Love. You." The tip of his tongue flicks at her lips. When he increases the pressure almost imperceptibly, she opens for him, and that delectable, commanding tongue slides over hers, exploring every surface, every tooth, every curve and ridge of her mouth. His tongue! He should have a license for what he can do with it—and he hasn't even left her mouth yet.

And then he does. He begins to caress her neck, to run his tongue behind and below her ear, while his hands leave her hair to reach for the hem of the T shirt she's wearing. "We had a deal," he says, briefly abandoning her neck so that he can tug the jersey over her head. He lets it fall on the floor next to the bed as he rolls them over so that she is now on her back. Cupping her buttocks, he raises her up slightly and peels off her panties.

"Yours, too, Castle," she says, reaching for his waistband.

"Done," he says, shoving his boxers off in one move and tossing them to the floor. They are both bare now, both looking at each other from head to foot. "You are unbelievably beautiful. Incomprehensibly beautiful," he says, his study of her body suddenly less leisurely and more extensive than it had been a minute before. His hands, which she quickly learns are as magical as his tongue, work in tandem with his mouth to touch and taste and savor every inch of her: shoulders, collarbones, hipbones, breasts, navel, ribs, stomach, veins, capillaries, moles, freckles, scars.

God, she thinks, my scars. My scars shouldn't be part of this. She doesn't want him to stop at them, doesn't want him to pay them any mind. And he doesn't really. He treats them just as he does every other part of her.

She's short of breath, giddy and scrabbling against the sheet. Fully exposed in a way she has never been with any other lover, she realizes that she trusts him. She trusts him. And then he puts one of his sinfully talented hands on her right knee, nudges her legs farther apart and begins to trace her adductor muscles with his tongue, up along the soft, sensitive expanse of her inner thighs. For the first time in her life she understands what it means to be truly frantic with desire. She's chanting his name, inarticulately begging him, when symbiosis arrives, the greatest symbiosis she has ever experienced, his flattened tongue reaching her clitoris, settling there and pressing down just as he plunges two fingers into her. She comes so hard and so fast that she almost knocks them out of bed.

"Castle," she says, when she finally finds her tongue, wishing said tongue were back in his mouth, or catching the bead of sweat that is trickling down the back of his neck. "Castle. Come here. Holy fucking fuck."

"Not yet," he says, moving up to rest his chin just below her clavicle. He licks his lips. "Holy fucking fuck is next."

She has never laughed that hard in bed before. "Oh, you're smug. You're so pleased with yourself right now, aren't you?"

"Aren't you?" he says.

"Pleased with myself?"

"Pleased with _me_ , Beckett."

"Oh, very. Very pleased." And she flips him, somehow managing in one seamless move to pin him down, her thighs bracketing his. She slants forward, hovering just inches above him, letting her wild hair tickle and tease him before she kisses his bicep, the sexiest arm she has ever seen. She's never allowing him to wear a shirt in private again. "You love what you did to me, don't you?"

"Oh, yeah," he says, making no attempt to suppress a grin.

"What about what I'm doing to you?" she asks as she wraps her hand around his truly—though she wouldn't flatter him by saying that aloud, at least not yet—monumental erection. "I'm responsible for this, aren't I, Castle? What do you think I should do about it? Should I," she draws her tongue from base to tip, "do this? Or this?" She squeezes his balls while taking him a few inches into her mouth, before sucking seductively and releasing him. "Should we take a vote?"

He manages to squeak out a response in the form of a question. "Vote?"

"My vote is for neither. Mine is for holy fucking fuck. And yours?"

"Oh, same. Same here."

"Okay then," she says, taking him in hand and slowly lowering herself onto him. She gasps sharply as he fills her, and he tenses.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes, God, yes. I'm so all right. So right." She begins to rock against him, trying to etch into memory every second and every sensation. Trying to keep her eyes open so that she can watch him watch her. They begin to move like a perfectly calibrated machine, expect that there is nothing machine-like about what they are doing. It's art, really. They read each other as if this were their thousandth time together, not their first, and it is powerfully, blisteringly new. She feels as if she is about to fly apart, and so does he, as if they will fly apart together and float back to earth as one perfect whole.

"I can't hold out much longer," she says. "You coming, Castle?"

"Oh yeah, holy fucking fuck I am." And they do fly apart together, hanging on to each other and not letting go.

Her sweat-slick body is draped over his as he slips out of her. "Oh my god, Beckett," he says, his voice drenched in panic. "Oh my God, no condom. I forgot."

"I don't care. I've got it covered. Which is a good thing because you're not. Covered, that is."

It's his turn to laugh. "Oh, you're good. I don't have the brain cells at the moment to come up with something that good."

"I'm glad you forgot. Really. I'm glad you were uncovered. I didn't want anything between us, figuratively or literally."

He's nibbling on her ear. "What about next time?"

"Not next time, either. You know, Castle, I bet if we did what we just did, only standing up against your door instead, it would fix the hinge."

"I bet you're right. We'd pound it right in there."

"Wanna try it?"

"You're gonna have to give me a few minutes, Beckett."

"That's not a problem," she says, and kisses him with everything she has. "We have the rest of our lives for that."

 **A/N** Thank you all, more than you can imagine. Excuse me while I go try to fix that door.


End file.
